Hollywood’s vibes have been so bad for so long for a reason. “People have been feeling pretty hopeless,” Rep. Laura Friedman says about the crushing economic impact of the various calamities that have befallen the town and industry over the last few years. But, shockingly, there’s some hope on the horizon in the form of growing momentum behind a federal film and TV tax incentive. Friedman tells Elaine Low that lawmakers from both parties are working with industry guilds and Donald Trump‘s Hollywood ambassador Jon Voight, and there’s hope the proposal can move by year-end. She describes the unusual bipartisan effort as giving lawmakers “an extra sort of joy” in working together: “We’re still one country.”
At least for now: Dire warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI that increasingly autonomous AI agents could launch cyberattacks — or worse — have an especially chilling implication for Hollywood, where studios and streamers are rapidly weaving the tech into their businesses. “Imagine a world in which there are thousands of Sony hacks happening in real time,” Reel AI columnist Erik Barmack tells Elaine and Sean McNulty. “You could take down the entire industry. Confidentiality, protections, the secure release of IP — all of those things could be harmed.” And while the guilds fight generative AI and Hollywood hashes out rules for how it can be used in making film and TV, Erik says the industry may be focused on the wrong threat: “What happens when recursive learning gets better and better, and these agents go off and do thinking on their own?”
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